Bastille II

This link to King 5 website from yesterday is helping to foment the fervor over rooftop gardening...

Onto the Radio

If this isn't ridiculous, what is?
On the radio KIRO 710 AM...Living Well

Cherries

In the very unlikely chance that you have not noticed: it is cherry season in Seattle. This is about the closest thing to a candy tree that you will ever find. If you look around, you will see that there are cherry trees literally all over the entire city. Cherry trees are easy to identify: in the early spring they are famous for their incredibly showy white or pink flowers, and in the summer they have cherries all over them. There are a lot of varieties out there, some very large and sweet, others smaller and more tart. The smaller types are typically used as
"pie cherries", baking with them allows you to add a
little sugar, thus making them more palatable. Other
types are sweet enough to eat directly.
There is absolutely no chance that I will tell you where
the cherry trees that I like to pick are located, but if you
take a walk around your neighborhood, you will almost
certainly find a cherry tree. If located on someone's property,
obtain permission to pick (which is usually easy to do) and go to town.
This bowl represents approximately 1/20th of yesterday's harvest (we picked about 40 lbs in one hour)...most are now in the process of being pitted and heading to the freezer...

Holes In My Leaves

If you have a vegetable garden, there is a good chance that you are growing something in the Brassica family. If you are growing something in the Brassica family, there is a good chance that you will have pest problems. If you have pest problems there is a good chance that some of these pests might be the problem (in a general order of appearance in the season): Cutworms, Root Maggots, Cabbage Loopers, Aphids...

Early in the spring, maybe your broccoli or cabbage started to wilt and look like it was not getting enough water? Maybe it wasn't getting enough water, but maybe it had been munched on by Cutworms, which had eaten a ring around the base of the plant, cutting off the nutrient and water flow from leaves to roots and vice versa.
Maybe your spring broccoli instead took on a yellow color and never seemed to grow, maybe you decided that you needed to fertilize more...maybe the roots were being eaten by Root Maggots.
Here are some suggestions for control of these pests (although a little late for this spring...).
We have taken to applying beneficial nematodes at the first sign of damage in the spring...

Just maybe, you had no problems until early June when all of the sudden there appeared large holes in the middle of all of your broccoli leaves and some of the newer leaves were bitten off entirely. Slugs? More likely you can now proudly consider yourself part of the Cabbage Looper club. Look all over your brassicas for little, bright green catapillars (also look for brown, wet, squishy looking balls of muck. This is frass, or catapillar poop.) Squish the loopers immediately between your fingers and notice that their innards are much darker green than their exteriors. Take a quiet satisfaction in learning this new piece of natural history.

Loopers are out and about right now and, if neccesary, can be organically controlled with Bt, but in a small garden it may be just as effective to look over your plants every day for a week or so and eliminate every green catapillar that you encounter. The coolest way to manage your loopers is to attract beneficial parasitic wasps that will lay eggs in the catapillars and eat them from the inside out... seriously. The added bonus is that the adults are attracted to a lot of flowering plants, including Valerian, which theoretically could also be used to make "calming teas"...
If your plants are healthy and you catch the damage early, there should be no long term repercussions from their damage.

Lastly, watch out for Aphids which are just now showing up and going to town on just about everything in your garden....when caught early, aphids can be managed with a combination of soap sprays and hand squishing. You can also bring in more beneficial insects such as ladybugs and lacewings...
But if you can't tell, regardless of which pests you have and which remedies you apply, I think it is best just to get used to squishing bugs...

GQ?!!?

Is this picture really in the May issue of GQ?
Believe it or not, there is an article called "A Man's Introduction to Vegetable Gardening"...I got a call from an editor at GQ who said "Is it alright if we take a picture of you for our magazine?" and I said "I don't see why not..."

Bastille

Can you believe that there is a new restaurant opening soon Ballard called Bastille? And even though it is slated to open in mid-summer, it isn't opening on Bastille Day? It might sound ridiculous, but it is true. I suppose everyone is just too excited to get started. I know that I am. Somehow, through the powers of small town Seattle, we got the opportunity to help them set up a garden on the rooftop of the restaurant. So this is a picture of one of the new raised beds (built by some very talented carpenters) in which we will be attempting to grow salad greens. As I understand it, there will be a "Rooftop Salad" on the menu and our goal is to produce as much salad as humanly possible to satisfy the well documented, endless appetite for such a commodity. Mostly we will be growing wild arugula, small head lettuces and many "soft" herbs that are apparently essential to French cuisine. Quite an adventure so far...everything is assembled, irrigated, seeded and ready to go. This is the part where things should start to grow...

Alice

Not that anybody is keeping track...but I haven't blogged in a while. Not that there has been a lack of fodder...to say the least, the past few weeks have been a whirlwind tour of Leeds England. Spring has come on with a vengeance, intermittent sunshine mixed with rain and warm nighttime temperatures have made this (in my opinion) the best spring in a few years. Things are growing. To further complicate things, SUFCo. has been transitioning into a new headquarters (more about this later)...so we haven't had much time to breath (or play leisure sports). Interesting things have been happening. It seems that everywhere you go, someone is ready to talk about local foods and/or baseball. A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to meet Alice Waters at a farmer's market.


I am not sure if I should attempt to explain the importance of Alice in the local food movement. Briefly, she started a restaurant serving fresh, local foods in California Chez Pannise back in the day, way before it was cool. In my opinion, she is certainly one of the most influential food activists in the universe. There is even a great PBS documentary "Alice Waters and Her Delicious Revolution. I picked up a copy of her new book Edible Schoolyard which chronicles the advent of a gardening/cooking program she helped develop at a school in Berkeley. Which is very timely as we are currently trying to work out the details to help set up gardening spaces and curriculum at a few schools around Seattle. Anyways, the point is that she is really cool, and even though she wasn't signing body parts, she did sign my book and seemed like a genuine person.